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Swiss Start Criminal Proceedings Against Falcon Bank

On Wednesday the Swiss financial regulator FINMA announced that it had
recommended prosecutions against at least two senior former executive
officials of Falcon Bank as part of the actions taken over 1MDB.
Yesterday, the Attorney General’s Office went a considerable step
further than that and declared that it is opening criminal proceedings
against the entire Abu Dhabi-owned bank!
The implication of the shocking announcement is that the Swiss law
enforcers suspect that the entire operation of the private bank was
flawed from top to bottom, making it effectively a criminal enterprise.

“The OAG [Office of the Attorney General] suspects
deficiencies in the internal organisation of the Falcon Private Bank
Ltd. It is believed that due to these deficiencies, the bank was unable to prevent the commission of the offences currently under investigation in the criminal proceedings relating to 1MDB.
Swiss law .. allows the prosecution of a legal entity that is suspected of not taking all the reasonable organisational measures that are required to prevent natural persons from committing offences, in particular money laundering or corruption offences.”

The Attorney General’s Office points out that this is the second
Swiss private bank against whom such radical measures have been taken,
all relating to money laundering of money at 1MDB. The first, of
course, was BSI closed in May.
Falcon transferred no less than $3.8 billion related to 1MDB’s
sovereign wealth transactions, highly unusual for a small private bank.
However, the regulators focused on one blatant transaction of 21st March
2013, where Falcon acted as an intermediary for $681 million dollars from 1MDB, passed into Prime Minister Najib Razak’s AmBank account in KL.
In the course of just that one day the money was passed from BSI Bank
in Lugano, filtered through three private ‘investment funds’, passed to
an account at Falcon Singapore named Tanore Finance Corporation and
then on to Najib’s personal account. FINMA described the Tanore account
owner, Eric Tan, as a young Malaysian businessman with known political
connections.

This manoeuvre had triggered several established money-laundering
‘Red Alerts': there was the size of the transaction; the speed with
which it had passed through the account (providing no commercial logic
to the transaction); the link to a politically exposed person and, of
course, the final destination of the cash which was the politician in
charge of decision-making at 1MDB – a man who had no legitimate reason
to acquire a $681 million lump sum.
FINMA further points out that staff had indeed alerted management
about all these factors and argued they must reject involvement in the
deal:

“A number of bank employees expressed serious concerns to their managers about the relationship with the Malaysian businessman because of numerous suspicious factors and key questions remaining unanswered. One internal email relating to the transfer of USD 1.2 billion states: “We can’t find any reason/motivation/statement why this transaction has to pass through FPB [Falcon] and not from [Bank X] directly to the respective parties […].” Nevertheless, these internal warnings were not followed up satisfactorily.

Although the bank’s decision-makers were aware of these internal concerns, they decided to carry out the transactions.
The focus was always on trying to process the transactions on time. One
senior manager warned the Singapore branch carrying out the
transactions: “Head Office is watching you”.

When Najib decided later in August to close the relevant AmBank
account after the GE13 election (it had topped a billion dollars before
the election in March) Falcon Bank also agreed to receive the transfer
of its remaining funds of $620 million.
FINMA quoted an internal Falcon Bank email, showing an
acknowledgement of the illegality behind the decision on the part of
banking management, but they had already been implicated by their
earlier involvement:

“We started this six months ago and now we have to go through with it – somehow”. [FINMA STATEMENT]

FINMA had said the attitude of management to the money laundering was
driven by the connections between the Board Members on the bank, who
represented its owners Abu Dhabi’s Aabar/ IPIC fund.

Private Bank or Private Money Laundering Machine?

These Board Members were Aabar Chairman, Khadem Al Qubaisi and CEO
Mohammed Al Husseiny (Chairman of the Falcon Board at that time), both
of whom had collaborated with Najib in stealing money from 1MDB in
return for hundreds of millions of dollars themselves in kickbacks.
They have been arrested and are under investigation in Abu Dhabi.
For months Sarawak Report has slammed the Chief Executives of Falcon
Bank, in particular the recently departed ex-Golman senior executive,
Eduardo Leemann, who presided over the use of Falcon Bank as a blatant
tool for Aabar’s crooked bosses to suck money from the various
enterprises they had responsibility over.
Those criticisms are now vindicated.
Falcon now joins BSI, Edmond de Rothschild Banque Privee and Coutts
under investigation – raising fresh concerns over the role of the
private banking industry, together with off-shore centres, in
facilitating money laundering on a gargantuan global scale.

Silence From Australia

Yet, as major action gets under way in Europe, silence pervades in
Australia’s banking regulatory circles. No enquiries have been launched
by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) or related
bodies, despite the fact that the major ANZ Bank is the majority
shareholder (by far) of AmBank, which received and handled all these
dirty monies in KL.
The bank also managed a series of internal Malaysian accounts
belonging to Najib, using money stolen from the 1MDB subsidiary SRC
International, also declared to be under investigation by the Swiss
Prosecutor in a separate earlier announcement this week.
Yet, just days ago, when questioned in
the Senate, ANZ’s present CEO, Shayne Elliott, continued to deny his
head office held any supervisory responsibility for actions at AmBank,
despite the face that each and every senior office holder overseeing the
KL operation is on secondment from ANZ.
Indeed, this supervision had been the big selling point for AmBank,
under the plans drawn up for investing in the market by ex-CEO Mike
Smith (who unexpectedly retired as the 1MDB scandal swarmed around the
bank last year). According to The Australian:

“He [Elliott] said ANZ had not investigated whether any
staff on secondment to AmBank had done anything wrong. “They are no
longer employees,” he said. “They are responsible to the board of
AmBank. AmBank has conducted those investigations.”

This is a position that seems quite impossible for ANZ to sustain
under any genuine scrutiny of the facts. The evidence is overwhelming
that seconded staff remained employees of ANZ, returned to ANZ and
remained reporting back to management of ANZ during their period of
office in KL, as numerous bank press releases and other documentary
evidence testifies.
This is how the ANZ seconded Australian, Mandy Simpson describes her
own status on her Linked-in, while employed AmBank’s Chief Finance
Officer – she says she is simultaneously employed by ANZ:

Mandy Simpson – CFO of AmBank during Najib transfers, also with ANZ

Likewise, the Chief Risk Officer Nigel Denby:

Nigel Denby – simultaneous role

The head of AmBank at the time of the
Najib accounts, Ashok Ramamurthy was also declared to be still reporting
to ANZ headquarters by ANZ’s own media releases of the time:

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Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts.Moynihan

'When we follow the money trail up through the pyramid of world power, past the corporations, past the corrupt politicians, past the front groups and past the mainstream media propagandist – we always find it leads to the Rothschild Banking Cartel, which is sitting quietly at the top, well behind the scenes'.